The European Commission is proposing to legislate to force all the continent’s public bodies to open up their data for re-use by citizens and private developers, and also wants to give “internet survival packs” to hacktivists challenging repressive regimes.

OnlineOpen is available to authors of articles who wish to make their article freely available to all on Wiley Online Library. Wiley will also submit OnlineOpen articles in PubMed Central and PMC mirror sites. In addition, authors of OnlineOpen articles are permitted to post the final, published PDF of their article on a website, institutional repository or other free public server, immediately on publication.

Around the world governments are increasing the amount of data that they release as ‘open data’. Open data is data that is free, available to everyone and is available in formats that computers can read.

The Open Data Strategy for Northern Ireland contains the framework and principles by which we aim to build capacity for delivering open data in Northern Ireland. The implementation of this strategy will create an ‘open by default’ culture whereby the publishing of open data becomes part of everyday management practices. The strategy covers all of the Northern Ireland public sector.

Opening up public sector data is the right thing to do in terms of transparency, accountability, efficiency and in driving economic growth through the innovative use of data.

When the technology is in place later this year public sector bodies will be able to publish open data for the public, private sector and academia to use.

Despite widespread support from policy makers, funding agencies, and scientific journals, academic researchers rarely make their research data available to others. At the same time, data sharing in research is attributed a vast potential for scientific progress. It allows the reproducibility of study results and the reuse of old data for new research questions. Based on a systematic review of 98 scholarly papers and an empirical survey among 603 secondary data users, we develop a conceptual framework that explains the process of data sharing from the primary researcher’s point of view. We show that this process can be divided into six descriptive categories: Data donor, research organization, research community, norms, data infrastructure , and data recipients . Drawing from our findings, we discuss theoretical implications regarding knowledge creation and dissemination as well as research policy measures to foster academic collaboration. We conclude that research data cannot be regarded as knowledge commons, but research policies that better incentivise data sharing are needed to improve the quality of research results and foster scientific progress.

Humanitarian organizations need both timely and accurate information when responding to disasters. Where is the most damage located? Who needs the most help? What other threats exist? Respectable news organizations also need timely and accurate information during crisis events to responsibly inform the public. Alas, both humanitarian & mainstream news organizations are often confronted with countless rumors and unconfirmed reports. Investigative journalists and others have thus developed a number of clever strategies to rapidly verify such reports—as detailed in the excellent Verification Handbook.

On Feb. 6, the Office of Management and Budget sent a letter to the Sunlight Foundation explaining how it planned to comply with our FOIA request for Enterprise Data Inventories. These inventories are compiled by 24 federal agencies as part of President Barack Obama’s 2013 open data executive order.

The release, which we believe will represent the largest index of government data in the world, is not just important for open government advocates. It’s important for journalists, researchers and more.

OpenDataMonitor brings open datasets to light. As a platform, it gives visitors an overview of available open data resources, allowing them to analyse and visualise existing data catalogues using innovative technologies.

Open data makes great promises and offers untapped benefits for individual, public and private decision-making. However, these benefits often come with hidden costs and risks. Taking some inspiration from “A theory of the calculus of voting”, we present a modest attempt at formalizing a “calculus of open data” to help data providers make this decision.

At the London satellite event for Open Con earlier this year, myself and Ross Mounce were given some useful feedback after our joint talk on ‘Open Data’ by one of the attendees. Apparently, some of the terminology was too complex, or specialist, for the subject, and some of the talk was unable to be followed unless you were already an expert in the issue.

Data is second only to journal articles in terms of importance to science communication and publishing–it’s the rocks from which diamonds are refined. And as a researcher, chances are you’ve got research data lying around on your hard drive or server.

rOpenGov is a community-driven ecosystem of R packages for open government data and computational social sciences.

More specifically, rOpenGov community is a group of independent package developers working with and/or interested in open goverment data analytics. rOpenGov acts as a loose umbrella for independent projects dedicated to open data streams relevant for computational social sciences and providing R-bases tools to access and analyze these information sources. Project was officially launched in 2013 and is maintained by a core team.

On 21 February, thousands of transparency activists, software developers, designers, researchers, public servants, and civil society groups are gathering at more than 100 cities around the world for the fifth global Open Data Day.

In political speeches and recent reports there has been a significant focus on the potential of open data for economic growth and public sector efficiency. But open data isn’t just all about silicon roundabouts and armchair auditors. Here are five reasons why open data matters for social justice and democratic accountability.

After a pitch from session leaders we were left with that tricky choice about what to go for. I attended a great session led by Ellen Broad from the Open Data Institute on creating an Open Data board game. Creating a board game is no easy task but has huge potential as a way to reach out to people. Those behind the Open Data Board Game Project are keen to create something informative and collaborative which still retains elements of individual competition.

Recently I attended the conference of a major learned society in the humanities. I was only there for a day, and attended only two sessions: one as a panelist and the other as an observer. Both sessions dealt with issues related to Open Access (OA), and in both of them I was deeply taken aback by the degree to which the scholars in attendance—not universally, but by an overwhelming majority—expressed frustration and even outright anger at the OA community. The word

In an effort to encourage more research be made openly available, higher education institutions have begun to enact their own open access policies aimed at increasing the momentum. Michael Eisen welcomes such action but remains disappointed at the inclusion of an optional faculty opt out clause in the University of California’s mandate. Previous attempts at flexibility have led to certain publishers requiring their authors to necessarily disregard institutional policies, thereby counteracting any significant change to the broken publishing system.

Diederik Stapel, a professor of social psychology in the Netherlands, had been a rock-star scientist — regularly appearing on television and publishing in top journals. Among his striking discoveries was that people exposed to litter and abandoned objects are more likely to be bigoted.

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